Adding multiplayer just sounds like the run up to trying to edge into the online survival building game market which is simply not going to go well.

Your post is basically "I couldn't have said it better myself."

For my own note: let's take an RPG standard from the 90s, which (while admitted losing a lot of the RPG elements over the years) was continued into the 2000s, and remove all the RPG elements and make it a survival game aping all the other shitty survival MMOs out there and years past their expiration date. Let's face it: the genre is super saturated and Fallout has its name as a Single-player RPG. We'd all love co-op, but not this.

But hey, Beth has a great track record breaking into saturated multiplayer genres: look at Brink.......

The sad part is: Fallout is actually a GREAT setting for this time of game, but I have zero faith it will be anything more than a buggy cash-in with a Fallout skin. And with the always online, it's unlikely "mods will fix it" will fix it.

I still laugh that too this day Beth doesn't even understand Fallout, and has to go to a company like Obsidian to make an actual Fallout game.

EDIT: I should add, there's enough mindless Fallout fanboys to make this game a success even if it's a total trainwreck, outside technical issues. I have so little faith that I have to assume as long as the game FUNCTIONS, Beth will print money.

I don't really blame 'fanboys' for the success of franchises that have been tanked. Relatively tiny demo. I blame parents with disposable income who will never read a game review in their lives and just know that their kid 'liked the other one'. For the middle class, I can confirm that the cost of games in general is still *just* low enough that it registers as a financial break-even if it turns out to give at least six to eight hours of play. And that an unrelenting number of the parents in my neighbourhood will pre-order whichever game has the most ad posters in the EBgames store window. Non-gamer parents are notorious for poor consumer research habits, generally shopping on the theories that 'one shooting game is the same as any other really', and 'it's a popular series, right?'.

Lagmonster wrote: Non-gamer parents are notorious for poor consumer research habits, generally shopping on the theories that 'one shooting game is the same as any other really', and 'it's a popular series, right?'.

That last is a generational thing speaking from the most trustworthy of evidence... anecdotal experience, that this current generation (24 and below) even the most humble of house has some experience with video games even it's just cell phone games. In my own work dealing with people in person from various walks of life I keep hearing from 30-40 year old parents about how they just had a Super Nintendo or a Genesis or maybe a PlayStation and that's all they had till college meanwhile current generation Little Timmy had had his game console for awhile now and regularly watches XYZ Youtuber.

The encroachment of video games into every aspect of school life is all over the place unlike forty years ago when only the rich kids had their ColecoVision and Atari 2600, 30 years ago when we had our Super Nintendo and Genesis with all 15 add ons. Twenty years ago we were just shy of start of the Playstation 2 domination era and ten years ago gaming was hitting mainstream with the one hundred million Wii U's that were sold.

The era of the clueless mom and dad buying Murder Simulator 2000 fears from the 90s is almost done with, but of course we can always trust on Grandma to buy us Barbe Dream Adventurer 2010 because she found it on sale in Walmart for only 40$.

"A cult is a religion with no political power." -Tom WolfePardon me for sounding like a dick, but I'm playing the tiniest violin in the world right now-DaltonI'll eat my boots if Clinton gets less than 48% of the vote in November.-maraxus2 August 4th 2016

I don't really blame 'fanboys' for the success of franchises that have been tanked.

You are right in that I'm not doing a good job explaining the type of fanboy/girl I'm thinking about. Essentially, not the "Nirvana was better before Nevermind went mainstream" type of fanboy but the type who holds up Nirvana BECAUSE it's mainstream. I don't have any gamer friends, but man did fucking everyone text me about Fallout 76. Because Fallout is essentially dead. It's a brand, not a franchise. It's trendy. And I could forgive that, like I do with Elder Scrolls (even ESO) if they FELT like Fallout games rather than..... the Dungeon and Dragons movie.

I hate to be a little bitch-boy here and be "that guy," but I'm going to power through it because Bethesda doesn't actually KNOW anything about Fallout other than the thin veneer of what they took from the older games. Get ready, because I'm about to be that guy even I hate: The gore, the pop-culture, the 50s references. This IS Fallout to them. Much like, even though it's an enjoyable little game: Shadowrun Boston Lockdown is really not much of a Shadowrun game. It's a bunch of references to Shadowrun, with a skin on top, that just throws "Shadowrun shit" at you.

I've said this before, but you could reskin and redub Payday 2 into a Shadowrun game and it would feel more natural than any of the isometrics that have been released.

This is Fallout 3 and 4. 76 is likely going to be the same thing: it's Fallout because it has a few elements of Fallout in it: nukes, robits, rusted shit-piles of buildings. And I'd just shut my stupid mouth and admit "This is what Fallout is NOW" and deal if it weren't for New Vegas near perfectly capturing the feel of the Fallout 1 (and maybe even 2, but 2 also had issues being referential). The only real complaint is the aesthetic of New Vegas (the city itself): too much with the rusted out bullshit assets Beth's dev kit is chock full of and IIRC: Obsidian was told to not make things look "too clean" to keep with the Fallout Aesthetic (which to anyone who played the original would seen as moronic). New Vegas should have been much cleaner and more polished.

Anyways, this is all why Beth will continue to do rando shit with Fallout: they don't even know what it is, except an open-world RPG that many companies won't take a shot at. And this means they CAN do whatever they want with it and it will sell because the customer doesn't know (or care) what Fallout is.

My stupid rant aside, the fanboys come in because Fallout is a brand they are "required" to have, much like CoD, because it gives them their nerd cred which is why (IMO) Beth delivers in the Gore, juvenile humor, explosions, and not much else. New Vegas had that as well, but many other things on top of it.

I have this problem here because since Fallout 3: what has expanded? What has Beth done to build the Fallout universe? I enjoyed Fallout 3, but most of it was the crib notes from earlier Fallouts. It also took a hard-dump on a lot of established lore from earlier because they wanted "Fallout things" so they put in "Fallout things" with generally no explanation on why or how they got where they were. Super Mutants in D.C.? Needs an explanation, got none I can think of. What really did F3 do to expand any of the concepts of Fallout or even create new ones? The Brotherhood, Enclave, water purification, GECK, VATS. Really, Fallout 3 is noteworthy for successfully moving Fallout into FPS/TPS. But for the lore?

All I got is "Liberty Prime." Some of the DLCs did a bit better in this regard.

Fallout 4 added the Institute. The Railroad really deserves no mention here because a lot of their motivations are moronic and they're a one note joke. In fact, near the entirety of Fallout 4's new factions or ideas are in the vein of either "no thought put into the writing" or "moronic." The Institute itself has motivations that really hamper any credit given to an otherwise interesting faction. And the Brotherhood goes from tech scavengers to some kind of "less bad" Enclave who want to blow up the most technologically advanced center in the world because "reasons."

Even the Vaults became jokes. Sometimes literally in cases: "Hey, let's just do RANDOM and WACKY experiments on the survivors of nuclear holocaust because...... there is no because. Just fucking do it."

If Beth has added anything to the universe, it's just cobbled together ideas from Bladerunner and Fallout 1 and random stupid shit they thought would be funny. And Fallout was always kind of wacky, weird shit went on, but I never got the feeling the writers would explain something with the line "for teh lulz."

Now, just take a look at an area of New Vegas. One single-faction. One single area. New Vegas even manages to answer how New Vegas feeds itself, even if the engine couldn't support the scale of the endeavor they'd need.

And I can shit on the Elder Scrolls games for becoming derivative in the gameplay department, but their lore guys are on point. Skyrim alone dove into the concept of the Thume, Dragonborn, Altmer Supremacy (The Dominion), the eruption of the Red Mountain and the emigration of the Dunmer, the racism of the Nords clashing with said emigration. A whole civil war, cracks in the Empire. The list just goes on and on because Beth understands and writes what they want the Elder Scrolls universe to be. ESO gets some shit, but there's expansion there.

So, Beth can't really expand the Fallout Universe in a Core Fallout game. So then I ask: "What does Conan Exiles add to The Conan Universe?" Sure yea, there's some stuff about the Architects and the Sea People the Exiles came from. But that's it, nothing is fleshed out. How many of these "builder/survival" games expand on ANYTHING other than PvP shenanigans or base-building?

This shit is most likely to end up in the vein of the Metal Gear Survival game. Where fans are suckered into a derivative game, but with AAA polish (though with Beth, you never know how much, if any, polish you get) because of the Brand name.

Either way... I went and pre-ordered. Couldn't get the REALLY NICE Marine helmet, but did get the "patriot pack", with BETA

Librium Arcana, Where Gamers Play!
Nitram, slightly high on cough syrup: Do you know you're beautiful?
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them."A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet

I don't pre-order games after Brink. Star Trek Legacy was another (Beth) title that started me down that path before that. So, my argument doesn't have a lot of weight.

I would be leery (and avoid) pre-ordering anything out of Beth proper. Even many of their published games as they have some arcane contracts and have been noted to push release dates up out of nowhere. Forced to use Beth's broken and buggy version of the Gamebryo engine and develpment tools, Obsidian were able to make Beth a cool $300+ million in profits (in the first year IIRC alone) with New Vegas, but Obsidian lost their bonus because they were required to carry an 85 (IIRC) on Metacritic. They might have done so if not for near all the complaints being "the game is buggy and crashes a lot."

If I cared to, I might pre-order something they publish from id because id either just knows their shit that well and/or is able to negotiate in a way that keeps Beth from fucking things up too badly. But out of Beth proper? I'd expect a release trainwreck Beth is slow to fix and there's no modders able to patch what they won't or can't fix.

Though I hope I'm wrong and I AM very interested in seeing a multi-player implementation of the Creation Engine. Skyrim Together is still working on a completely vanilla implementation of co-op (no SKSE). It's possible since it's just an extension of Gamebryo and Rift was made using that. Though I'm laughing at the idea of Beth trying to implement netcode considering this will be their first multiplayer game they've developed. It's possible they're shifting some ZeniMax Online guys around or bringing in some talent, but on the hardware end, I wouldn't be surprised to see another Brink disaster.

I myself might wuss out since I don't boycott Beth. Which also makes me a hypocrit because I bought Farcry 5 on release day knowing only that it had co-op and the game was decently optimized. I wouldn't find out until loading that the game is actually a technical marvel considering the publisher as it can maintain 40FPS with all worthwhile settings on Ultra at 4K with a 980Ti.

That said, I'm also considering a pre-order because my wife has Amazon Prime for school and Fallout 76 is $48 with Prime. Though there would be little point if my buddy doesn't but it as I don't really game solo anymore. I would actually need to see more from the gameplay because I could just wait until the price drops further.

Something has been rattling around in my head. "Country Roads", is that the song Merlin sang in Kingsman: Golden Circle?

Yes. I saw that same song in about 3 films in short succession (Kingsman, Logan lucky, and ... something else) and wondered why. All I could find was that there hadn't been a fire sale of the rights to it, the reason was just that a lot of creative directors who grew up liking it are all coming to the position where they can choose to put it in things. We may all become very sick of it in a the near future.

Something has been rattling around in my head. "Country Roads", is that the song Merlin sang in Kingsman: Golden Circle?

Yes. I saw that same song in about 3 films in short succession (Kingsman, Logan lucky, and ... something else) and wondered why. All I could find was that there hadn't been a fire sale of the rights to it, the reason was just that a lot of creative directors who grew up liking it are all coming to the position where they can choose to put it in things. We may all become very sick of it in a the near future.

NEVER!!! At least, never in the Mountain State. It's one of our State Songs.

Librium Arcana, Where Gamers Play!
Nitram, slightly high on cough syrup: Do you know you're beautiful?
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them."A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet

Fallout 76 is a massively multiplayer game with player-versus-player combat. This raises questions of how the game will manage the more malevolent members of the player base, those hellbent on killing other human players and disrupting their enjoyment.

Bethesda Game Studios has thought about this, game director Todd Howard said this weekend at QuakeCon: “We turn the assholes into interesting content.”

What that means is, a human player who kills another will become a “wanted murderer,” with a bounty on their head. That bounty is going to be paid out of the offending player’s cap total, and will be commensurate with their level. Furthermore, players will be alerted to these “wanted murderers” presence on the mini-map — they’ll be flagged by a big red star. But the murderers themselves won’t be able to see other players, or even know that they’ve been flagged.

Fallout 76 will also feature a “revenge system” whereby players killed by another human player can go back, find them, and try to kill them for double the ordinary cap payout. PvP kills in Fallout 76 will be paid off according to the level of the player taken down, Howard said.

The only way to rob another player is to trick them into getting a bounty on their head. Say, by missing your first few shots at them so they shoot back. But since they got the first hit, the game registers them as the aggressor.

I log on as a level five or so character, get done by someone at the top level with the best gear, and then what? Also, couldn't friends then exploit this? Say some friends and I run around together, friend A and B kill various lower characters. Then they remove any unique gear, I kill them for the caps, then they presumably lose the bad guy status and we split the loot.

"Oh no, oh yeah, tell me how can it be so fair
That we dying younger hiding from the police man over there
Just for breathing in the air they wanna leave me in the chair
Electric shocking body rocking beat streeting me to death"
- A.B. Original, Report to the Mist

"I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately."
- George Carlin

Don't forget about Bethesda trying to hide evidence of people tricking you into getting a bounty by not telling you that you have one.

My question is: What happens with the double payout from revenge kills ?
- If it generates the caps, that means people will exploit it to quickly generate them.
- If it takes double the normal amount from the player being killed, that makes the bounty system being used to rob people worse.

I remember the original bounty system in Eve Online. The one where pod killing someone gave you all their bounty. So the only people with a high bounty were people using it to show off (often sticking a bounty on themselves), as everyone else just got a friend to pod them and split the money. Sticking a bounty on someone was really donating money to them. The new system, where you got a payout from a players bounty pool based on a percentage of the value of their assets you destroyed, prevented exploits. But it didn't encourage kills either. Last I heard, the only entertainment people had from it was when someone raged in chat because they got a bounty. Which only invited more people to contribute to their bounty.

How many people working on Fallout 76 have worked on MMO-like games before ?

Beth has lately seemed driven by "hey, this sounds cool" with details such as how to make it fit in the game or make it functional dead last on their agenda. Fallout 4 was a wash of half finished ideas in this vein. 76 seems more of the same.

As QuakeCon 2018 continues, so too does Bethesda Game Studio’s steady drip-feed of information about their games, and specifically about post-apocalyptic multiplayer survival RPG Fallout 76. Its E3 showing left a lot of questions unanswered, and last night Gary Steinman, Todd Howard, Jeff Gardiner, and Chris Meyer shed some light on those lingering unknowns, including player progression and anti-griefing measures.

When asked by Steinman, associate director of content, who was acting as the ‘Q’ part of the Q&A, to describe the game, game director Howard jumped right in to address a more overarching question that’s been in the minds of fans since E3: just how Fallout-y is this Fallout? “I think like 80% of it is the Fallout everyone is used to, and the other 20% is really different,” he said.

Obviously, those percentages really depend on what you think makes the series what it is, but the panel dug more into what’s new. First up was the perk system, which now comes in the form of cards you can assign to each of your skills, as well as mutations caused by radiation exposure that bring both unique abilities and significant drawbacks. You can watch the Vault-Tec-style introduction below:

The team elaborated on perk cards, explaining that you will be able to choose from a selection of cards on level up, and that they can stack to form more powerful skills. Notably, the game has no level cap, but stats stop going up at level 50, instead encouraging experimentation by continuing to offer choices of new perk cards. Randomised card packs given at certain intervals will also encourage players to step outside their usual builds and try new things. All perks are also changeable any time – though menuing doesn’t pause the game, so best to make sure you’re safe first!

They also showed off a little of the photo mode, which gives me a great hope that I’ll be able to live out my dream of playing entirely as a photojournalist, and revealed that you can change all elements of your character customisation, from hair to gender, at any time.

Tragically, not everyone is planning to play this game as a photographer, and the panel went on to explain how they are disincentivising griefing. It’s possible to ignore and block players, as well as participate in or mute local voice chat, but there are also specific systems in place when it comes to PvP.

When you first shoot another player, you won’t deal too much damage until the other player responds, at which point a real fight breaks out. Higher level players won’t receive many benefits from preying on lower level players, either, and if someone is killed without fighting back at all, their killer becomes a “wanted murderer.” The murderer receives no reward for killing the player who doesn’t respond, and instead, a bounty is placed on their head. Other players can see their location on the map, and if they are killed they will lose the bounty money from their own pocket. “We turned assholes into interesting content,” Howard summarised.

Another big question mark in my mind is on the subject of nukes, which players can find and detonate, destroying other players, their buildings, and the environment around them. Using them is also incentivised as it’ll create a minature wasteland-within-a-wasteland, with new enemies and rewards. And where the anti-griefing systems may have allayed some of my fears, the discussion here did not. “Nukes, very cool,” began Steinman. “Nukes are very cool,” agreed development director Meyer. Sure, they were only talking about the game feature, but it still seems to run counter to the pretty straightforward message that nuclear war is bad, actually. Their discussion suggested the same blasé celebration as the video from E3 called “Atomics For Peace:”

Regardless, you can blueprint your homes to rebuild them easily if they are hit by a nuke, or just to move them around if you’d like to relocate. In fact, Howard said that being able to destroy buildings at all had less to do with wanting players to knock down each other’s hard work and more to do with avoiding griefing again – without destruction mechanics players could lock others inside with no way for them to escape.

In the same vein, dying isn’t a really a terrible punishment in Fallout 76. If you are killed, you’ll lose your junk, which is useful for building, but no other items. So it’s best to store any valuable crafting materials you have before exploring a dangerous area, but if you do end up taking a fall and can’t recover what you dropped, it shouldn’t be too tricky to reclaim by looting elsewhere. Respawning is also free unless you want to use it as a fast travel opportunity, which costs some money depending on how far you want to go.

If you’re super eager to test out all of this information for yourself, it might be best not to hold your breath just yet. Though the beta will begin in October, Howard emphasised that it would be a significant stress test. “It’s gonna break,” he promised. “We’re pretty sure of that. Get ready.” (To be fair, he also promised they would fix it fast.)

Fallout 76 is coming out on November 14th, and will only be available through Bethesda.net. You can watch the full Q&A below:

Challenge for you: Name a multiplayer game released in the last few years that has randomised card packs given at certain intervals but doesn't give players the option to buy lootboxes containing those cards.

We also get clarification that the bounty will only be applied if the attacker killed someone who didn't fight back. Question is: Does shooting in the direction of someone, intentionally missing every shot, count as fighting ?

Because I expect anyone intending to become a wanted murder to store their caps elsewhere first. Say, on a second account.

In the same vein, dying isn’t a really a terrible punishment in Fallout 76. If you are killed, you’ll lose your junk, which is useful for building, but no other items. So it’s best to store any valuable crafting materials you have before exploring a dangerous area, but if you do end up taking a fall and can’t recover what you dropped, it shouldn’t be too tricky to reclaim by looting elsewhere. Respawning is also free unless you want to use it as a fast travel opportunity, which costs some money depending on how far you want to go.

Given the PvP nature of this game, everywhere is a dangerous area.
Building materials being easily acquired elsewhere is believable. Being able to quickly acquire them is not.
Respawning near the person who killed you is free. Wanting to respawn some distance away costs. A pro-griefing mechanic.